Our Top 4 Resources for Twice-Exceptional Kids!

DO YOU KNOW A TWICE-EXCEPTIONAL KID?

Twice - Exceptional (2E) kids are those who are gifted in intellectual capacity and also have one or more learning disabilities, attention deficit, autism spectrum disorder, emotional or behavior disabilities, or other types of learning challenges. As a parent and/or an educator of a 2E kid, it can be difficult to know how to support both areas of growth to ensure you're cultivating their giftedness while at the same time supporting their specific learning, social or emotional needs.

In our Saturday Share this week, we've compiled our top 4 favorite resources for parents and teachers of 2e kids.

Understood.org also has a helpful checklist for you to ask your school about how they plan to support your 2E child.

In this article, Stephanie Tolan explains that we traditionally identify and measure giftedness by externals – performance and achievement. For example, early speaking, unusually advanced vocabulary and reading/communication skills. Many gifted students are advanced in specific skills or developmental milestones but may lag behind their same-age peers in other areas. This description of asynchronous development and how we can reframe our perspective on the 2E child can be helpful for all parents and teachers.

The equalizer is a continuum-style approach to instruction developed by Carol Ann Tomlinson. The equalizer is drawn to look like the sliding buttons seen on audio components. Each of the nine bars on the equalizer’s continuum represents a different instructional element that can be modified to meet kids' needs.

Most often struggling students are performing at the left side of the continuum while the advanced students find concepts on the right hand side of the continuum to be a better challenge. However, as we know with many 2E students, the level of each of these 9 elements of learning can differ greatly. We find that using this equalizer approach helps 2E kids to identify where they are on each element's continuum in order to understand and work with educators to create the most helpful academic programming for their needs.